'Scorpio Rising'

A short film from Kenneth Anger that explores, among other things, themes of hero/rebel worship, motorcycles, "cool" and even religion and Nazism.

Like it or hate it, the American Nazi Party (which I'm sure was increasingly popular in 1963) protested the film because they said it disrespected their flag. So, I guess if the Nazis are against it, it makes me for it in some associative order.

There's no dialogue outside of a persistent soundtrack of rock and roll music of the time, which doesn't necessarily tell a story as much as highlights the vague and ephemeral nature of "rebelliousness" or "cool."

'REPORT'

When you refer to filmmakers as "artists" you might be referencing guys like Bruce Conner more so than Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman or Orson Welles.

Conner was an artist and film -- or film collages -- were one of his media. He basically took existing newsreel footage and edited together with sounds to create film shorts. REPORT chronicles the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in October 1963 when Conner and his family were living in Massachusetts.

It's a quick-paced, tightly-edited 10-minutes short with camera footage of everything from Kennedy's arrival at Love Field to the limousine caravan through downtown to Lee Harvey Oswald's perp walk and his own demise due to the bullet from Jack Ruby's gun.

It was interesting to hear the news media orate the happenings, before they even knew what would happen, making odd references to guns or even to Jackie Kennedy's pink outfit. Other times, Conner takes a 10-second strip of footage, of the limousine carrying the president, and edits it to play over and over. You sit and just wait for the rifle bullets to blast through his skull. It's particularly tense.

'Meshes Of The Afternoon'

Experimentation has different meanings based on the medium.

Being experimental in literature or film typically means you're insanely long or insanely short, all the while, not making a ton of sense. Think "Meshes of the Afternoon" or most of Samuel Beckett's work.

Musicians have a different playing field. You can get as weird as you want in the recording studio, but in the end, those notes don't mean anything. You can't really misinterpret a note or sound. You can either not interpret it or interpret it. What John Coltrane or John Lennon does on their instruments does not breed revolutions or change minds. Record and release fart noises or highway traffic and that's experimental.

A musician can make a five-hour album of animal noises and it'll probably be terrible. Beckett or the avant-garde in film can do the equivalent and it be one of the films I need to se ebefore I die.

'Un Chien Andalou'

What's so wrong with a 16-minute film? It's perfect actually. How many hour-and-a-half films did you wish were just 20 minutes long and with all the good jokes and good scenes left in and all the fluff taken out.

An 80-minute movie in the 1930s was not out of the ordinary. Salvador Dali's 16-minute piece of surrealist, avant garde bullshit is good only because you invested just 16 minutes and got to see an eye sliced open by a straight razor.

Hate it? That's OK. You spent just 16 minutes of your life digesting it.

Frankly, you could probably only handle 16 minutes of it. It's as fucked up as you'll ever see in your life.